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Sixteen undergraduate students from 91��Ƭ�� and universities across the country spent nine weeks this summer conducting hands-on research at the Institute for Smarter Cities, Spaces, and Health through its NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site in Sensing and Smart Systems.

Working alongside faculty and graduate student mentors, the students tackled research projects across the institute’s Smarter Cities, Smarter Spaces and Smarter Health focus areas. Their projects explored challenges ranging from urban transportation and artificial intelligence to marine renewable energy, underwater sensing, robotics and technologies for human health.

In Smarter Cities, several projects examined how real-world data and digital models could be used to better understand urban environments. Vedant Sundriyal developed a method for transforming imperfect 3D city scans into models suitable for future wind simulations. Randy Amparo combined real-world vehicle and pedestrian trajectory data with traffic simulation to reconstruct activity at an urban intersection, creating a platform that could be used to evaluate transportation improvements without disrupting actual road users.

Mahfoudh Senhoury similarly used simulation to study transportation infrastructure, developing and validating a digital twin of the Glades Road and Airport Road corridor in Boca Raton. When he used the model to test a proposed connector road, the results showed that an improvement that reduced traffic at one location could increase travel time across the larger network — demonstrating the value of testing infrastructure decisions virtually before implementing them in the real world.

Nidhi Begur, Grace Gao, Emily Diaz-Silva, Juliette Plaisir and Dylan Heslop worked together to develop CineSage, a searchable video-memory system designed to help AI answer questions about long-form footage. The system combines information about scenes, individual frames, objects, dialogue and people across a video to retrieve relevant moments and provide evidence-supported answers, with potential applications in public safety and smart-city systems.

Students in Smarter Spaces explored technologies designed to operate in challenging environments. Steven Cohen investigated underwater direction finding using a single hydrophone and a bio-inspired acoustic structure, gaining his first hands-on experience with digital signal processing.

Ashlynn Vick studied the energy consumption of a batteryless sensing platform designed for intermittent energy-harvesting operation, generating benchmarks that could inform the design of future environmental sensing networks. Shania Ziegler and Irem Ider worked on two approaches to marine renewable energy, improving an existing wave energy converter while developing a scaled ocean current turbine design for future fabrication and testing. Andrew Haselton redesigned a soft robotic jellyfish to more closely replicate natural locomotion, producing net positive thrust while maintaining the soft structure needed to operate around fragile aquatic environments.

In Smarter Health, Roger Tawfik and Jeffrey Huang investigated methods for extracting useful information about human movement from ordinary video. Tawfik developed a quality-control system that can determine whether gait video recorded outside a traditional laboratory is suitable for analysis and provide instructions when a video needs to be recorded again. Huang evaluated different approaches for detecting heel strikes and toe-offs using estimated 3D joint positions, finding that relatively simple biomechanical methods could perform as well as more complex deep-learning techniques.

Huang's project also provided firsthand experience with a part of research that can be difficult to recreate in the classroom: working through results that do not initially meet expectations.

“One of the big things I faced was learning from failure,” Huang said. After encountering challenges early in the project, he continued refining his approach and ultimately achieved promising results in the final weeks. “That taught me a lot about how research works and how I have to iterate through concepts.”

Research in the lab formed the core of the nine-week program, but students also took part in experiences designed to develop skills they could use throughout their academic and professional careers. Students participated in professional development and research communication workshops, visited research and industry facilities and stepped outside the lab for team-building activities. Along the way, they became a cohort — learning from one another, celebrating progress and navigating the inevitable challenges of research together.

The summer culminated in final research presentations, where all sixteen participants shared their work with faculty, peers, friends and family and answered questions about their methods, findings and next steps. The session concluded with recognition for Outstanding Research, Outstanding Presentation and a People’s Choice award.

“The goal of this program is to give students an authentic introduction to research and the opportunity to discover whether this is something they can do,” Hallstrom said. “After watching what they accomplished over these nine weeks, there is no question that every one of them has the ability to pursue a path in research.”

This experience may lead each student in a different direction. Some will return to their home institutions with new technical skills or a clearer sense of the questions they want to explore. For others, these nine weeks of experimentation, problem-solving and discovery may have opened the door to a future they had not previously considered.

“My desire to pursue a graduate education and enter a career of research has been immensely strengthened thanks to this experience,” Cohen said. “The satisfaction and joy of overcoming these unique challenges to make innovative contributions is something I find very appealing from research.”

The students arrived for the summer ready to explore research firsthand. They left having designed, built, tested, questioned, failed, adapted and tried again — with a clearer understanding of what it means to be a researcher and the confidence to decide where that experience might take them next.